Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Three mostly imaginary immigrant people I see around sometimes

Male / around 70 / Mendeleev beard on a match stick frame. Every time I see him, he's walking either to or from the supermarket to get a single can of beer. His gait is best described as 'slanted'. He is the only man alive who still knows all 160.000 lines of his people's national epic by heart in their original Trans-Uralic language isolate. His eldest son is called after its hero but he's in Hamburg now. The boy works in the stockroom of a brewery and is married to a German girl.

Female / at least 40+, but quite a bit older than she looks, I'd say / a very lean North African lady, perpetually wearing running gear. When she was 23, she got kicked out of the Sorbonne for unspecified infractions (widely rumoured to have been either a reckless lesbian affair with the wife of a famous academic-turned-politician or a string of acts of lighthearted left-wing terrorism). Nowadays she makes a comfortable living, trading Aztec pottery online.

Male / 50-ish most likely / actually ties his ragged jeans with rope. He's Iraqi of Sunnite stock but for years now has been living under the assumed Kurdish name of the family patriarch he shot point blank in '83. It was chalked up as just a political murder; really though, he killed the man because he could and wanted to. I saw him once, whistling at his own reflection in a city bus window.